Beth Moore
I’m sure you’re aware of the most recent Beth Moore kerfuffle over on SBC Twitter. Beth has revised her already scant teaching on the topic of homosexuality to bring it into conformity with the spirit of this age, which is to say, she has entirely removed it from her lexicon and her bibliography lest she “demonize” anyone. (No danger of her books being censored by Amazon.) She then labels those questioning her as “hyper-fundamentalists” who are “attacking” her. Meanwhile, sundry of the Who’s Who of Big Eva are actively trying their best to shield her from any criticism, while numerous Revoice participants applaud her “Christ-likeness” in expunging all references to homosexual sin out of existence. Her legions of carnal and poorly discipled followers constantly contribute their “atta-girls” and “we got your back sister” to the spectacle.
I know social media probably isn’t the best format for such discussions, but it seems that no one in the SBC or Lifeway leadership is interested in getting doctrinal answers from, or holding accountable, the most influential teacher in the SBC unless the Twitter peasants like myself get riled up and keep the public pressure on for answers. Is there a better way? Inquiries to the “proper channels” seem to go into the abyss unanswered. Whether it’s the PCA or SBC or whatever, how does Joe Churchgoer actively participate in preventing his denomination from apostatizing?
JD
JD, just be a noisy bucket. Be as noisy as you can be, given everything. But don’t be an empty bucket. We don’t need more of those.
Kudos
I cannot begin to say how blessed I have been in my ministry and marriage through your work. The Lord has been very kind to Moscow, Idaho and his kindness is extending to many of us here in London through the work of Christ Church and the resources you put out. I hope to meet you one day, thank you for helping me think through how to be a true husband and father.
Sam
Sam, you are most welcome.
Racial Slurs
Do you disagree with the left that “redskins” is a racial slur, or do you disagree with the left that using racial slurs is a bad thing? And if you agree with the left on both of those counts, then what exactly are you complaining about?
Mike
Mike, I don’t think it is a racial slur. Or at least is wasn’t until the rise of the Racial Slur Discovery Industry.
Patriotism
I want to thank you for all your posts over the years about how to be a Christian patriot. You have done an exceptional job of teaching how to keep things straight in this area. Thank you!
Steven
Steven, you are welcome, and thanks for paying attention.
Housekeeping
Technical question and forgive me if I didn’t get some memo, but I can no longer access Blog and Mablog as an app on my phone or iPad. I searched the App Store to reinstall it and couldn’t find it. Is it no longer an app? Thanks.
Anne
Anne, it is no longer available as an app. We had to discontinue it because it was just too buggy.
The Rise of Liberty
I checked out the Douglas Kelly book The Emergence of Liberty in the Modern world. An “aha” moment came from a reviewer’s description. [The book] “is a thoughtful challenge to conventional Enlightenment historiography.” In my experience, my educators didn’t even stop to think about the Enlightenment being the lens through which we are viewing history in the social sciences. The Enlightenment is synonymous with truth and to criticize anything about it is to go back to the dark ages. No wonder there are no hooks to hang a religious liberty comes from Christian though argument on. All my hooks are from a particular worldview that likes to paint Calvin as an intolerant bastard who frog marched his opponents through the streets of Geneva, and forced them to recant publically recant for disagreeing with him. I’m looking forward to this reading.
Joe
Joe, enjoy.
A Hard One
Would you consider writing one of your “letters of advice” to me? Two years ago, my sister announced that her 3 year old daughter was now a “boy”. Since then, we (my family) have been standing for the truth in love and avoiding pronouns, but are really getting nowhere since our words are unintelligible to one another. Maybe it is fruitless to use logic to fight a lust, but I would be interested in your comments.
Heidi
Heidi, stand fast. You already summarized everything perfectly with that phrase “use logic to fight a lust.”
Leggings and More
I wrote a piece on leggings for my university paper a decade ago and got a bit of blow back but I also got a lot of guys saying very quietly “thanks, I thought I was the only person who was thinking it.” Your angle of “screw you” really adds the necessary depth that the “screw me” one lacks. Having just gone to the beach with my family and asking myself whether this is the best place for a man to spend unoccupied hours, I was wondering if you have any unique insights into the following keywords: swimwear, women, men, family vacation, modesty, etc. Thanks
Jordan
Jordan, I hope to write more on all of it.
Thank you for this post. Could you please cover bikinis next? I grew up in a beach town and it was pretty common to hear Christian women say that it was not your place to call someone immodest for wearing a bikini. Modesty is actually a matter of the heart, they’d say, and you can’t judge their hearts. I’ve even heard this from pastors’ wives and (since the Lord has changed my own heart in regard to modesty) it’s always left me a little gobsmacked.
Tricia
Tricia, a matter of the heart is precisely what modesty isn’t. As noted above, I do hope to write more about all of this.
I’m a week late on the modesty discussion. I’ve got a wonderful wife that fully desires to submit to me in the area of modesty. But I have hard time defining what is modest and what isn’t. I’ve generally trusted my gut. “I’ll know it’s immodest when I see it.” But that results in conversations like: “Honey, that skirt seems a little short.” “But, I asked you about it two weeks ago and you thought it was fine.” “Oh I did?”
I don’t want to be too legalistic, but my wife almost wants me to be legalistic so she knows what standard she can use to buy her clothes. How do you set a standard that a wife and daughters can use, without becoming legalistic?
Roger
Roger, make up some house rules. They are just rule of thumb, and then deal with exceptions as they arise.
Re: “The Immobile Moderate,” it’s not just things learned in the 60s that will get you called an extremist. We’ve reached the point where ideas presented in women’s studies classrooms at liberal universities in the late 90s and early 00s are now considered views only a deplorable reactionary would hold.
Lori
Lori, yes. The revolution is a gigantic conveyor belt that runs to the lip of the abyss.
Inconsistent?
“Some hundreds of protesters, moms mostly, showed up outside to protest this travesty of a pig’s breakfast, and so, naturally, there were 30 or 40 cops there to protect the drag queens, along with two SWAT team snipers on the roof, also there to protect the sacred mission going on inside.”
If I remember correctly, you have previously used the number of cops necessary at one of your own events as a proof for how horrible the protesters were. To use them in the opposite manner here feels inconsistent.
Jon
Jon, not quite. I had about twenty cops around me so that I could deliver a lecture in a university classroom, and the protestors were dedicated to not allowing me to deliver a lecture in a classroom. In this instance, moms were protesting the sexual grooming of young children, and they were considered the threat. Every society has a protected class and a threatening class. Everything boils down to “what should we protect?” and “what do we think of as threatening?”
Just out of curiosity, which Revoice participants are applauding Beth Moore?
I’ll try to link to some of them here.
Nate Collins
Wesley Hill
“Gay Christian” Matthew Vines also “hearted” her shift.
Thanks, JD. I have profited quite a lot from some of the people affiliated with Revoice, though I am opposed to the conference. I was curious who among them was calling Moore’s shift “Christ-like.”
I don’t think Vines or Ortlund are affiliated, Vines views seem beyond the Revoice Pale.
Ray Ortlund has taken the lead in rallying the troops to circle the wagons around her. He got plenty of helpers. He tweeted, “Friends, we need to figure out how to redirect the Twitter attacks away from Beth and others of our allies and toward ourselves. Is there a way?”
It looks like he may have deleted that tweet afterward, but I have a screenshot of it.
I haven’t followed this at all closely, but Reformation Charlotte (which, as you know, I thought was a person like Catholic Jill) says she was been hanging with Sam Allbury and Preston Sprinkle.
Well, Heidi seems to have a good broad handle on things but I’ll bet she’d still appreciate some more detailed advice. And the rest of us would benefit, too. So I second the request for a letter on when someone close to you falls into the transgender swamp.
Heidi is right, it is useless to use logic. Useless to use logic to fight an inanity. People wander into that swamp in the first place because they are blind to logic. Is “Don’t be asinine!” really an inappropriate thing to say to a loved one? What would be your visceral reaction to “transgender” or any related nonsense? Is it un-loving to ridicule the ridiculous, if it is honest ridicule? Does self-evident nuttiness merit a reasoned response? If Christians had simply laughed to scorn the first church-going nut-job to broach the matter, instead of treating it as a matter to… Read more »
I would caution Heidi against, as she put it, “avoiding pronouns.” This is not loving, nor does it help win the argument. The kid was born a girl; therefore, she is a “she.” With that stumbling block out of the way–or right out in the open where everyone can see it–Heidi will be better positioned to have a logical conversation. I would also offer up this helpful analysis. When someone sees a vagina and declares “it’s a boy!” there are really only three possible options: 1. The person is in stark rebellion against the Maker. She does not WANT a… Read more »
There is a fourth possibility (much more likely with an older child, but nonetheless): the child expressed some degree of ongoing gender dysphoria, and the parent sought medical attention. If the child’s unhappiness is causing symptoms of emotional distress, she has probably been referred to a child psychiatrist and then to a therapist. Or, the child is old enough to be in school where she shared her feelings with a teacher. Any of these “interventions” are almost certain to lead to the parents being medically advised to transgender the child. It takes enormous powers of resistance to hold out against… Read more »
Jill, that is a very good point to make. We often talk in terms of what we should do, forgetting what is imposed upon us by power. Is this especially a California thing, or is the situation equally horrible everywhere? I would not be surprised either way. I know it is easy to say until you’re faced with it, but is child custody, especially if we’re talking about an older child, something worth clinging to at all costs? Seems to me by the time a parent is dealing with the scenario you have described they have already lost their little… Read more »
JohnM, maybe this is a case of the frog sitting in the slowly heating water but why would anyone give up their child to this mad tyranny? Why stay in the country at such a cost? We are to submit to authority as far as it does not contravene God’s. Take the child and flee to Egypt.
Indighost, I had in mind Jill’s “(much more likely with an older child, but nonetheless)” and pictured the older child as an adolescent, when frankly, if you’re having this kind of battle with them, and the state backs them, not you, you’ve already lost them. In a few years you would be past the issue of custody anyway. Even with younger children, if the cost is affirming the depraved insanity, helping it along, and that’s what you would be forced to do, how much good is your custody doing the child? Utterly heartbreaking, however you cut it. Fight it if… Read more »
John, re the figurative Egypt: As you know, there are no promised lands this side of heaven and there would be problems anywhere the refugee should end up, even if he were able to be choosy. From history we observe that human peace and prosperity tend to complacency and dissipation. Lot would have been better off somewhere less civilised than the cities of the plain; somewhere with not quite so much leisure time. I wonder how many teenage identity crises are exacerbated by having not enough good and useful work to do. I can’t help thinking that addressing external problems… Read more »
Indighost, Remember Egypt was not the promised land and should not be used figuratively in reference to that, but it works as a metaphor for a place of refuge because it was a literal place that served as a refuge for the time needed. However, for the metaphor to work in this instance there has to be some place or some situation to which a parent can flee with the child and find refuge from the insanity, else there is no use in advising “Take the child and flee to Egypt”. You think perhaps it is found in useful activity?… Read more »
It’s more extreme in California (a child 12 and over does not need parental consent for transgender treatment including puberty blocking hormones) and in Canada (refusing to accept your child’s new gender identity is grounds for CPS to remove the child). But where these cases have gone to court, the parents who oppose transgendering their child have usually lost. (This arises a lot in child custody cases between divorcing parents, and the only high profile case I’m aware of in which the parent who opposed it prevailed in court was unique because the child showed no signs of gender nonconformity… Read more »
Not sure of the distinction you’re making by calling it a “fourth possibility.” Gender dysphoria, if diagnosed as a psychological condition, is by definition a form of insanity…thus #3. If not that, then what possible cause is there for a girl to say she’s a boy except for devious motivations or outright rebellion? I will grant that what passes for “medical help” these days is as cracked up as the patients who need it, but I was making the larger point that what we’re really dealing with here is 1. rebellion, 2. play-acting, or 3. loose screws. The first two… Read more »
The fourth possibility is that the mother is acting that way under duress–that the child has come to the attention of medical professionals who are instructing Mom to affirm the child’s gender nonconformity. Most parents are too terrified of losing their young child to social services to mount a determined opposition to medical advice. Probably everyone has read a horror story about parents permanently losing custody for refusing to abide by their child’s wishes and the medical treatment plan. But here the age of the child makes that scenario unlikely.
Ah, I see it now. You were talking about the mother; I was talking about the child. Now, with that little semantic resolved, I return to my proposal that for the girl who desires to be a boy, there yet remain only three possible motivations: she’s pretending, she’s in high rebellion, or she’s utterly insane.
Is there another cause I’m not thinking of?
Perhaps that she has been indoctrinated into transgender ideology? Told that gender (not biological sex but the sense one has of being male or female) is fluid and malleable, that it does not necessarily match one’s chromosomal identity, and that medical science has made it possible to resolve this mismatch? That feelings create a reality that ought to carry more weight than what is observable and provable? Or perhaps she has been exposed to transgender children? What we do know is that children are infinitely suggestible and that, just as having an anorexic friend increases your daughter’s chance of developing… Read more »
Since Heidi said they have been “standing for the truth in love” my guess is that they have made their position quite clear, and that the reason for avoiding pronouns is not to avoid the issue in a broad way, but so that every single interaction they have is not about pronouns. If that’s not the case, then I agree with you.
Trans kids whose families don’t use their preferred pronouns are 60 something percent more likely to attempt suicide. Remember that when you are deciding whether or not to try to make a point. Yes we all applaud you bravery, being a jerk to a kid to make a point. Just remember that the kid should matter most in the situation.
This isn’t about the child, it’s about the mother. The child is three. Three year olds don’t even use pronouns properly consistently themselves even when they aren’t confused about their identity. Of course, three year olds are barely even aware that they HAVE an identity, sexual or otherwise, so that makes it even more unlikely that any of this is the kid’s idea.
The kid does matter the most in the situation. Heidi is trying to spare her from her mother’s delusions and manipulation. Pandering to the mother’s delusion matters less.
100% spot-on observation, Jane. The toddler is not the one running pretending she’s a boy; the mother is the deviant person here.
Yep. This is just Munchausen by proxy.
Okay I got some wires crossed. But in this case, kids have a gender, you can’t just change your gender, what the mom is doing, if indeed the kid is cis, very likely won’t affect the kid. Also Jane- you must not have been around many three year olds, they very much have a personality, and identity and gender. They definitely don’t have a sexual identity, people aren’t sexual until much later, but as for an identity, kids know who they are and what gender they are quite strongly, and express it strongly. Ask anyone with a three year old… Read more »
I’ve raised five three year olds. I’m aware that they HAVE a personality, identity, and sex. THEY’RE not fully aware that they have those things yet. They’re not meaningful categories to them. Of course they express themselves, but they’re not aware of a thing called “expressing themselves” that is more specific than just “being.” They don’t know who they are. To a large extent, they don’t even yet grasp that people, including themselves as well as others, are separate individuals with identities. They just feel stuff and do stuff. The fact that boys tend to do this in certain ways… Read more »
Kong, I think you may be mistaken in thinking that the cis child will not be affected by the mom’s behavior. At the very least, he is going to sense that Mom would have preferred to have a girl.
I believe the simplest approach to be the best. it’s not confusing at all and completely within the prevue of parental guidance. 1. Parent points to a car and says “car.” 2. Parent points to a tree and says “tree.” 3. Parent points to a circle and says “circle.” 4. Parent points to his three-year-old son and says “boy.” 5. Parent points to his five-year-old daughter and says “girl.” In each case, both the son and the daughter are taught how to identify things, what words mean, and are given incredibly useful information for navigating the next 70 years. Problem… Read more »
drewnchick, I agree. I’m only making the point that they don’t have thoughts about “what things are” independent of being told what things are, at that age. That’s a kind of abstraction that just doesn’t happen at that age. In this case, Mom is (so to speak) simply pointing at the child and saying “boy” instead of girl. So whatever that child is feeling, she is learning that those feelings are “boy.” There is no mechanism by which she is, or *could be,* independently thinking “boy but not girl, because boy is like this but girl is not.”
I’m aware of one study that found this. However, we need to remember that gender dysphoric kids have a much higher suicide rate than average regardless of how they are treated. Some studies have shown a higher incidence of autism among TG kids, although only among those who transition female to male. There is one research study and a lot of anecdotal evidence that some TG children have unusually high IQs. Other research suggests links between TG and eating disorders. There has not been enough research yet on what may be the underlying brain mechanism that results in gender dysphoria.… Read more »
Kong pontificated:
Unless the situation we’re talking about is abortion. Or leftist politics, where kids are used as pawns and human shields to provide cover for an increasingly bizarre ideology with a narrative that is becoming more and more insane by the minute.
Speaking of insane narrative, what is a “transkid”? Is that some sort of slang for adults who practice infantilism?
I’m not talking about abortion, I happen to be pro life. How about you actually address the issue, not just “attack the libs”.
A trans kid is a child who is trans…..
“A trans kid is a child who is trans…..”
Didn’t you claim to do really well in logic classes?
Kong said: I’m not talking about abortion… You don’t say! Neither was I. But since you seem like the type of person who doesn’t understand subtlety, here is the point in terms even you can understand: You leftists don’t care about children. It is your ilk that is doing Mengele-esque experiments on them and removing anyone who gets in your way. It is your comrades that abuse them — when they aren’t killing them. Repeat after me: A person’s sex is immutable. Period. I don’t care what rationalizations you invent regarding “gender identity”; anyone who calls a male female and… Read more »
“Useless to use logic to fight an inanity. People wander into that swamp in the first place because they are blind…” More than likely, they do not “wander”, specifically: “…each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire…they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers; and they will turn their ears away from the truth, and be turned aside to fables.” “Is it un-loving to ridicule the ridiculous,”? Emphatically NO: “Cry aloud, for he is a god. Either he… Read more »